De Summa Tormenta
by topaz1116
Summary: After Samaritan went online, they went into hiding. Now it's time for them to come out. Post S3 fic. Title might change.
1. Shaw

**Well, I found a severe shortage of post-S3 fics, so I decided to write my own. Please tell me if I get any characters wrong. Also, apparently there's no such thing as a dash in the text editor, so they just come out as hyphens (I tried using two, it auto-corrected to one).**

**I know this chapter is short, but I'm writing short chapters for this story. That way I can update more often.**

**If there are any typos, tell me; I typed up most of this chapter on my phone.**

* * *

Everybody has a secret.

That was one thing Cara Jones had learnt when she was still working for someone-officially, anyways.

When she had still been Sameen Shaw.

Now, she was someone totally different.

She didn't get to be an assassin anymore. She didn't get to shoot people, or be violent at all. She didn't get to down all the booze.

Now she had yet another secret, one that she nursed so closely to her that no one ever discovered it.

She went through life like a normal person with a normal life in a normal world where people didn't worry constantly about surveillance and privacy.

But technically, she was anything but normal.

* * *

Cara Jones smiled as she gave the man waiting at the counter his prescription. She had been doing that a lot lately; it was beginning to feel less fake and more real.

She was a pharmacist at the local hospital now, mixing chemicals to make people feel better. Cara Jones was cheery, pretty. She wore colorful clothes and didn't know how to use a gun. She didn't drink.

In other words, she was the exact opposite of Sameen Shaw.

Shaw sometimes wondered if Root had created her identity simply to spite her; she could have made an identity that was more like Shaw and less like Mary fucking Poppins.

She lived in a small city in California, a far cry from the bustling streets of New York. Her apartment was small; if she had something bigger, someone might wonder where she got all the extra funds.

It had been seven months since Samaritan had gone online; seven months since she had had to part ways with Finch and Reese and Root. Seven months since she had last heard from the Machine.

Cara Jones was content with this existence.

Sameen Shaw wasn't.


	2. Finch

**I decided that Root paid some homage to Harold's affinity for birds and gave him a last name based on that, so that was fun to research. Again, tell me if there's anything wrong with my character depictions.**

* * *

Even if you do a thousand things right, people will focus on the one thing you did wrong.

Arnold Gannet was easily the best employee at the small software company in Texas; therefore, the other employees disliked him. He had only been working at the company for seven months, but the older man with the debilatating limp was the subject of the boss's favor. Gannet was the most efficient. Gannet was always on task. Why couldn't everybody be like Gannet?

To be honest, it was a bit like a mother and her favorite child.

Gannet remembered when a hacker who had once been known as Root told him, "Don't be jealous, Mom still loves us both." Back when he had a purpose-one that didn't involve him sitting around solving simple problems he could do in his sleep, anyways.

He hadn't gotten a number in seven months, and the crime rates for New York had skyrocketed. Nobody quite knew why; nobody but him and his former associates.

There was no one to act on irrelevant information anymore, so countless lives that could have been saved were now gone. It killed Arnold-or Harold, depending on which identity he wanted to use-inside, but it was necessary.

He was one of the only people who was able to bring Samaritan down, so he had to stay in the shadows.

* * *

Harold had screwed up, to put it lightly. A simple mistake in coding-a single line-had disrupted the entire project. Nobody ever thought to look over his code; after they found no mistakes in the first few months, they had simply given up.

He had been distracted by the sound of a phone; a phone that made the same sound as the Machine made when it was calling a payphone. For a moment, he had looked around for the source of the sound-had the Machine finally decided to contact him? His fingers, however, had kept moving.

When he looked over the code again, after it had it been pointed out, he noticed something. The code he had used for the Machine.

It seemed he was going through a greater level of withdrawal than he had previously thought.

The boss, angry at the unfamiliar code, fired Harold. After all, it had been part of the company's biggest deal.

Harold was fine with it. If anyone found out his skills with computers, they could have been put to... other uses.

As he walked out onto the street, leaving the small office for the final time, a phone rang.

A payphone.

Harold looked around for anyone else it might be for, but there was no one else there.

It was for him.


End file.
